That was the hesitant declaration of BikePortland reader axoplasm, responding Friday morning to Thursday’s report about the organized resistance to mountain biking trails by people whose private property abuts the public land where they’d be built.

Axoplasm isn’t so much responding to this latest twist in Portland’s quest for singletrack, but more to the seeming futility of the quest itself. (As another reader, Charley, put it, “We’re not trying to build a lego tower to the moon, just open some trails to people who ride bikes.”)

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Here’s the comment:

MTBers are some of the most play-by-the-rules types you will ever meet. In places with less cronyish local politics that works in our favor. But in Portland we’ve been playing by the rules for 25years and our reward is ever less singletrack.

I will return as I always to my analogy with dog owners (I am one). There is no Northwest Dog Alliance or advocacy group. We have no unified voice in demanding essentially unlimited access for dogs to every park, playground, school, and natural area within 100mi of Portland. We just take our dogs there and do whatever we please. So many people do it, so blithely and with such entitlement, that the government response has been to try to lure dog owners & our pets into abundant, well-supplied, well-distributed public dog recreation zones.

I’m one of those play-by-the-rules types so this is hard for me to say. But somehow I don’t feel conflicted letting my dog off-leash at the baseball diamond. When everyone breaks the rules, the rules bend.

Mountain biking is a legitimate recreation activity with demonstrated demand. If our public officials can’t get it together to designate some public spaces to accommodate that demand, we should not feel conflicted to use those spaces anyway. If enough of us do it, we might find ourselves actually winning these battles for a change.

Here at BikePortland, we don’t advocate rule-breaking. But axoplasm’s analogy to dog parks is worth thinking about, and not just in the context of mountain-bike singletrack.

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70 Comments

David Hampsten, now in Greensboro NCApril 8, 2016 at 5:21 pm

Here in Greensboro, mountain biking is “allowed” (tolerated) in any city park, including ones with designated trails, for the very reasons that the commenter brought up – people just do it, and police don’t stop it. But god help you if you should skateboard on any street or city park, or ride your bike on a sidewalk downtown – they will arrest you and confiscate your board or bike.

Welcome to the new age Republican world of Donald Trump, at least here in right-wing homophobic North Carolina.

As far as the statement at the end, “Here at BikePortland, we don’t advocate rule-breaking.” Maybe, but you will publicize the latest exploits of PDXTransformation with enthusiasm.

Yes, no joke. This city is over-policed. They have even been documented for pulling people over for “driving while black.” Both boards and bikes are confiscated, persons charged, though it’s usually a misdemeanor, but the searches can lead to a felony, as can resisting an officer. Meanwhile, drivers usually go 20 mph over the limit, including the police.

Only in the same way as a business putting a reader board out in the bike lane (I’ve seen it done in Portland), a car parked over a bike lane, or a resident marking out their viewing spot for the Rose Parade with duct tape – it’s illegal, but tolerated. The benefit to society of PDX’s efforts far outweighs any illegality on their part (violating various City codes), but BikePortland’s reporting moral statement itself is pretty suspect.

“We just take our dogs there and do whatever we please. So many people do it, so blithely and with such entitlement, that the government response has been to try to lure dog owners & our pets into abundant, well-supplied, well-distributed public dog recreation zones.”

That is no doubt accurate, but a tough sell for me. Entitlement is such a troublesome trait. I guess it all depends on whether someone else is harmed by the entitlement, the pushy subgroup. With mountain biking I have my doubts that anyone is harmed; with dogs running everywhere the subject seems a little less clear but if people have well trained dogs, sure.

“When everyone breaks the rules, the rules bend.”

This cuts so many ways. This is how ODOT determines the safe speed on Barbur and other locations, too. If most people speed then that is good enough for them. But at Ladd’s, famously, we don’t get yield signs because the same percentage of people on bikes roll the stop signs at the circle.

Dogs are known to spread invasive species – yet they are allowed everywhere in FP and tolerated off-leash. I don’t know what is unclear about that.

I will say this – both of the issues you bring up are big problems that need to be solved and are highly visible _only_ because people break the rules, not because they abide by them. No matter which way it cuts, it increase visibility, which isn’t there for mountain biking in Portland. Some of the people protesting mountain bike access in the Tualatin Mountains today weren’t aware of the long struggle and politics that mountain bikers have faced in the Portland – and they actually support mountain biking! The biggest thing that can be gained from all of these issues is awareness and once people are aware, only then will things change in one way or another.

My point is this – it isn’t about feeling entitled and doing it. It is about creating visibility into a problem so that the problem can be solved. Right now, there is no visibility.

I think “entitlement” is the key word here. Just because you can’t imagine the harm doesn’t mean there isn’t any. If you’ll allow me a tangent that doesn’t mention bicycling: I once had a dog that needed to stay on leash at all times and that got freaked out by any “friendly” “well-trained” dog that approached off leash. He knew he was at a disadvantage on leash and was defensive. If he felt threatened, he’d growl or snap. Sometimes the other dog snapped back, and I’d be tangled (literally) in a full-on dog fight while trying to keep myself and my dog safe. So maybe the rules aren’t there for the average dog that frolics joyfully with other well-adjusted dogs. They’re there for the neurotic greyhounds and other rescue dogs who want to enjoy a walk to the park without fear.

I wonder what would happen if people just started building pump tracks in the actual backyards of NIMBY’s like Marcy Houle, then maybe they would be a little less agressive about keeping people from enjoying public property. I don’t advise it but can you imagine the look on her face if she woke up and looked out the back window of her house at a dozen people pumping around her backyard.

I have never ridden in ashland, but a google search brings up a group called RVMBA that appears to be working to build well drained, low erosion trails while advocating for decommissioning illegal trails. Pretty much exactly what NWTA is advocating for here. The whole point is that eventually if you keep pulling the rug out from under people over and over again when they work within the process to build sanctioned trails eventually they are going to get worn out and decide that it would be easier to just go ride their bike, and maybe build a secret trail in their neighborhood…

I ran into RVMBA a couple weeks ago while hiking on Roxy Ann, a mountain park in Medford. They were trimming the brush back along existing hiking trails and intend to add nearly 40 miles of both MB-dedicated trails and shared MB-hiking trails. Medford Parks manages Roxy Ann (Prescott Park), is doing an amazing job of building facilities that attract visitors from all over the western US (baseball and soccer). Roxy Ann could be a destination within a few years.

Couldn’t disagree more, BTI in Ashland used to be shared, now there are braided trails to keep conflict minimized. I learned to ride there, encountered many hikers while going high speeds, and never encountered as much vitriol as here in Portland

I have been advocating this and saying this for years. I hope more people take this to heart. The reason the government officials don’t do anything about it is because it isn’t a “problem”. We need to make it a problem. Only problems get solutions.

Great! Just like the Anarchists with their insulting slogans and behaviors. So who will be responsible when some off-leash dog mauls a walker or hiker? Not you! Responsiblilty doesn’t seem high on your ethics list.

How do you know anything about my morality or my feeling of responsibility if I ever hurt someone while riding a bike? Keep throwing out the unwarranted accusations, it reflects well. Just because I don’t see the harm in riding a bike on a trail doesn’t mean I don’t see my moral responsibility to help people around me (and I have helped many hikers out while mountain biking).

The seemingly inevitable giving up on laws/rules when a large number of people refuse to obey them has me thinking about our bike paths. These were originally called bike trails in Oregon (as were bike lanes) and were designated as roadways. The nomenclature was soon changed to the more common bike path/bike lane terms. As roads without sidewalks, Oregon right of way was clear: pedestrians had no right of way other than the usual intersection crossing rules and were required to proceed single-file as close to the edge as possible or on the shoulder.

Pedestrians simply refused to obey the law. Our bike paths became snarled with dogs and people spread out across the entire width, a problem that grew with the width of our population. Worse yet, as our streets became less pleasant to walk on, many people decided that bike paths should be off-street sidewalks.

What’s the difference? Well, on a sidewalk the pedestrian has absolute right of way and can block the way with impunity. Now that we have renamed our bike paths shared use paths, we have essentially made them off-street sidewalks, at least in name (as far as I know, they are still legally roads in Oregon). Little wonder cyclists are being intimidated, harassed and even beaten for riding on “their” off-street sidewalk.

If the MTB folks start taking over the unpaved paths, it’s really just a bit of turn-about. The same people who will complain about the scofflaw trail riders violating the law will walk down the middle of a bike path and block the way of traffic without a second thought about the fact that they are violating the law as well.

Perhaps we’re long overdue to take back more of our public space from cars and give it over to people on foot and bikes. The tiny paths in the corner just aren’t working for us.

This is why I make it a point to drive on the Springwater occasionally. It’s a bit slower than the main auto routes, but someone has to stake out a claim, and getting closer to nature is really nice; there’s just not that many opportunities for nature-driving in the city. It’s amazing how ill-mannered cyclists and pedestrians are. All that yelling and hollering! It’s like no one taught them how to share!

wow…if that comment doesn’t demonstrate how misunderstood mtbers and the mtb situation is in portland, i don’t know what would. If you live in portland and wanna ride a bike on dirt you better like your trails poached…

Ironically, there’s an editorial in the O today describing that Metro has decided that dogs are not compatible with regional parks. It seems that dog owners were not vocal about their needs so dogs are being excluded even when they’ve been accepted or at least tolerated in many parks for years.

It seems that in light of the potential for offending anyone many governments are starting to interpret their rules such at unless something is specifically allowed, it is not.

We even have the US Forest Service deciding that photography for commercial use is prohibited without a permit. I’m not sure how it you might be in violation if you post a photo of your bike ride in a National Forest without having gotten a photo to take it.

I’m not sure that the comparison to dogs is the appropriate one now that dogs and their owners are under attack, too.

but everyone does it anyway and so every park is a defacto dog park. I watched a dog take a dump in the middle of a school baseball field on my ride this morning, I could see the no dogs sign and the owner who was literally too busy doing tai chi to notice and had zero control over their two dogs. I offered her a dog bag to clean up the mess and she seemed quite annoyed that I had interupted her “workout”.

This could be Portland’s motto. And it’s a big reason why Portland’s gotten so tearing-out-my-hair frustrating to live in, in my opine.

I’m all for mountain biking trails but not this aggressive passive aggression.

p.s….I will never walk barefoot in a Portland park or schoolyard again. Nor on the beach, which makes me sad indeed. I’m amazed when I see kids running around and falling on that park/school grass. Bleccchhh!

One drawback to dog parks is that their existence legitimizes taking a zero-tolerance stance in regard to dogs off leash everywhere else in the minds of people who might otherwise be more tolerant of dogs off leash in areas where they’re not bothering anyone.

It’s like bike lanes–if there is one nearby, some drivers view that as meaning bikes lose all rights to be anywhere on the street except inside that bike lane.

Of course in the case of mountain bikes, people are already taking the stance they can’t legitimately be anywhere, so opening some trails probably doesn’t have that same drawback.

That attitude drawback exists here in Greensboro and many other cities with poor on-street bike infrastructure. The attitude of most elected officials and transportation bureaucrats here is, “if you want to bike, go bike in a park, where we have city-maintained trails and hardpack. Streets are for cars.”

Creating and designating specific areas for mountain biking is a lot like creating dog parks, homeless camps, or Indian reservations: you’ve contained the perceived problem, now you can forget about the problem.

As a consequence, its very hard to get this particular city to invest in any new basic bike infrastructure, such as “bikeways” (“Greenways” in Portland speak), bike lanes, or MUPs (“Greenways” in Greensboro-speak), let alone anything innovative, such as protected bike lanes, bike boxes, or bike-specific signals. On the other hand, this city is paying for a brand new freeway bypass, with very little federal aid, so it has plenty of money.

So I have to agree with the original writer, “Charley”, that you need to mountain bike everywhere you can get away with it, including and especially in all public parks, golf courses, open spaces, down alleyways, in unused PBOT right-of-way, and on ODOT lands, and be an “in-your-face” kind of problem, like homelessness, pandhandling, Starbucks, and brewpubs; otherwise, you risk getting nothing from the City of Portland, since you can be ignored, as you have for 30 years of “being nice”.

David–you got my point 100%. As a particularly disheartening example, Parks narrowed a regional trail so that bikes and runners couldn’t easily pass people walking dogs. Parks staff told me the dogs shouldn’t be on that trail because they should be in a dog park. I actually had to point out that the existence of a dog park does not make it illegal to have dogs outside of one, and in fact the ones in the dog park have to get to and from it. This was news to them. But that’s the attitude towards mountain bikes–they’re toys you take to the mountain bike park to play on.

Actually, I was thinking of the spaces along residential streets in East Portland and southwest Portland were sidewalks would normally be, but aren’t, and probably won’t be for the next 50 years. They would be good places for single-track, but then again, maybe perhaps a good place to pitch tents? In those same areas are also “paper streets”, pieces of right-of-way that were never built as streets, as they tend to be isolated within huge super-blocks, back in the county days before annexation in the 80s. PBOT still has these parcels scattered around, especially in the wilds of East Portland. In addition, BES and the Water Bureau have numerous unused and underused parcels all over the city, but especially in East Portland, that would make for excellent, ready-to-use, mountain bike parks. For example, the Halsey Hydropark, a triangle just north of Halsey and just west of 148th. Kelly Butte is another prime candidate.

“BikePortland.org is an independent daily news source that covers all aspects of the Portland bike scene.

Our mission is to inspire people in Portland and beyond to realize every facet of cycling’s vast potential.”

Mountain bikes are bikes, too.

I will still give you two reasons that I can think of, however: 1. Many of us who use bicycles to commute began as mountain bikers. Getting more people into any type of cycling will improve the overall cycling scene. 2. Some trails could be worked into an active transportation system. I commute up and over Washington Park and would love to be able to spend some of that commute on dirt, rather than share the road with cars. Perhaps having more trail options for portions of a commute (those fun sections to look forward to) would entice more people to hop on their bike to get to work/school in the morning.

There is a ton of ODOT greenspace in town, it would likely offload any fears of “adventure parks” per the McCurdy group. Heck they may even be an ally with this if it meant fewer people out in McCarthy creek

It’s ironic, but I had a conversation with Linda Robinson of the Friends of Gateway Green (future cycle cross park between I-205 & I-84) a few years ago, from within the park. The biggest opposition to her project wasn’t from TriMet, ODOT, the City, nor Metro, but it was from the immediate neighbors to the north, in Maywood Park and the nearby Portland neighborhood of Parkrose. It seemed that the neighbors’ main concern was that a new mountain bike park/cycle cross park would conflict with their present (illegal) use of the area as an open 37-acre dog park, where they didn’t have to clean up their mess.

In Portland, most likely, there are many more people owning dogs that they want to run on fields in their local park, then there are people that want to ride bikes on natural area trail within the city. So the support from the public for providing some use of parks with fields for dog exercising, relieving themselves, etc, may be far greater than support for using existing natural area parks for mountain biking.

There’s a big, crucially important difference between parks developed for field games, parties, concerts and so forth…and natural area lands within Portland and other metro area cities, secured to provide natural environment accessibility and experience to urban residents. A big priority generally associated with the latter, is excluding activities that detract from the quality of natural environment experience those lands are capable of offering visitors to them.

I’m curious whether mountain bike enthusiasts, contrary to rules and widely accepted and supported values inherent to natural area parks, deciding to appropriate trail in say Forest Park, would win support for use of that park’s trails for mountain biking.

A legitimate appeal to the city’s residents, as in a city wide vote to use some limited portion of that park for mountain biking, might succeed. Depending upon what type of mountain biking, use of that land was sought for.

Did we vote on whether or not we should allow dogs in parks? How about voting on whether or not we should be building skateparks? Why single out mountain bikes?

> A big priority generally associated with the latter, is excluding activities that detract from the quality of natural environment experience those lands are capable of offering visitors to them.

You mean like allowing dogs which bring in invasive species into these parks?

> A legitimate appeal to the city’s residents, as in a city wide vote to use some limited portion of that park for mountain biking, might succeed. Depending upon what type of mountain biking, use of that land was sought for.

There has been a lot of votes that have wanted more off-road cycling access – including the Metro levy that specifically mentioned cycling in it. That and the vote the single-track advisory committee voted on. Also, it looks like we now have an official city group and a mountain bike master plan. Seems to me the city has spoken, you just don’t like the result.

Dogs and people have co-evolved together. I will take off-leash dogs over leashed dogs any day. People need to be able to control their dog (leash may be required in certain circumstances) and they must clean up after them. Leash cause conflicts with other dogs and with other people walking and biking.

Evolution hasn’t stopped, but the time frames are such that there hasn’t been very many generations where humanity and doganity have been inherently urban species (though I suppose one could argue that the proliferation of tiny dog breeds is a direct response to urban living — they’re better leashed so they don’t get stepped on).

Yes, however it has been established that those paleolithic villages contained common green areas (that we might recognize as something like parks), and that those areas were governed by strict leash laws and mountain biking prohibitions.

The other issue is that the proto-hounds of the period were somewhat larger than we are today, having not yet begun the miniaturization process. It took, after all, over a hundred millennia for the oversized handbag to be developed, allowing for the final evolution of the modern apartment-dwelling dog.

There have been trails in the Frederick City watershed for decades that have been unofficially maintained by mountain bikers. The trails are unsanctioned, not exactly legal, but well tolerated by the community. It’s a fantastic trail network, that happens to border Gambrill State Park, another area near DC with a great MTB friendly trail network.

On my ride home tonight I saw a couple parks officers had stopped two people with a dog in waterfront park. They had a chuckit launcher with a ball in it, so I assume their dog was off leash at one point and they got busted for it. Maybe the dog was running up to people. Maybe it was behaving well and its owners were keeping it out of the way in the grass. I don’t know. Not sure if they got a warning or a ticket. I didn’t see the parks officers talking to any of the many people who were smoking, even though that is prohibited as well. There are other park rules that get flouted routinely that I never see any enforcement against. But dog owners get a decent bit of it. How many people here who like the idea of poaching trails are going to feel singled out and outraged if they get a ticket, or even just a warning? Check parkscanpdx and you’ll find plenty of dog owners complaining that they shouldn’t have gotten a ticket.